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Poison on the early modern English stage

Plants, paints and potions

Edited by Lisa Hopkins and Bill Angus

Poison on the early modern English stage
Hardcover -
  • Price: £85.00
  • ISBN: 9781526159922
  • Publish Date: Aug 2023
  • Publisher: Manchester University Press
  • Buy Now £85.00

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  • Price: £85.00
  • ISBN: 9781526159915
  • Publish Date: Aug 2023
  • Publisher: Manchester University Press
  • Buy Now £85.00

    Delivery Exc. North and South America

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    Book Information

    • Format: Hardcover
    • Pages: 312
    • Price: £85.00
    • Published Date: August 2023

    Description

    Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans' relationship to the environment.

    Contents

    Introduction
    Bill Angus and Lisa Hopkins

    Part I: Sources of poison

    1 'Balms and gums and heavy cheers': Shakespeare's poison gardens
    Lisa Hopkins

    2 Shakespeare and the snakehandlers: venom, vermin and the circulation of eco-social energy in Renaissance drama
    Todd Andrew Borlik

    3 Shakespeare's 'baleful mistletoe'
    Susan C. Staub

    4 Poisoning and poisonous Black bodies: Egyptian magic on the early modern stage
    Nour El Gazzaz

    Part II: Poisoners

    5 'Spit thy poison': the rhetoric of poison in Marston's and Webster's Italianate drama
    Yan Brailowsky

    6 Poisonous intent, or how to get away with attempted murder on the early modern stage
    Anthony Archdeacon

    7 'Let this deadly draught purge clean my Soul from sin': poisons and remedies in Margaret Cavendish's drama
    Delilah Bermudez Brataas

    8 Poxy doxies and poison damsels: venereal infection and the myth of the venomous woman in early modern literature
    Dee Anna Phares

    Part III: Victims

    9 'Thou didst eat my lips': swallowing passion in William Davenant's The Tragedy of Albovine
    Kibrina Davey

    10 'The leperous distilment': authority, informers and the poisoned ear
    Bill Angus

    11 Playing with poison: murder, proof and confession in early modern revenge
    Jessica Apolloni

    12 'No healthsome air breathes in': spiritual poison in Romeo and Juliet
    Khristian S. Smith

    13 'Death's counterfeit': the art of undying and the Machiavels in The Jew of Malta and Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany
    Subarna Mondal


    Index

    Editors

    Bill Angus is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at Massey University, New Zealand

    Lisa Hopkins is Professor Emerita of English at Sheffield Hallam University

    Kibrina Davey received her PhD in English literature at Sheffield Hallam University

    Poison on the early modern English stage

    Edited by Lisa Hopkins, Bill Angus

    Hardcover £85.00 / $130.00

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